Entries categorized as ‘Economy’
The New York Times – On Oct. 10, Forbes magazine employees anxiously arrived at work. The previous afternoon, a Thursday, the Dow Jones industrial average had closed below 9,000 points for the first time in five years, a drop of almost 700 points.
The staff was called into an emergency meeting, where editors decided to rip up their next issue. The economy was in trouble and so, potentially, was Forbes, a free-market proponent that had proudly marketed itself as “The Capitalist Tool.”
Instead of their planned cover, they wanted something that would address the upheaval. Their solution? Their own boss, Steve Forbes, the company’s chairman and an economic adviser to John McCain.
On the cover, which arrived on newsstands Friday, Mr. Forbes, wearing a suit and tie and smiling optimistically, appears under the line “How Capitalism Will Save Us.” Inside, Mr. Forbes assures readers “if sensible rescue efforts continue — and they will — the immediate crisis will quickly pass” and advises against “regulations that stifle innovation.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/business/media/27mag.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Categories: Economy · Forbes · Magazines
Benjamin J. Marrison, the editor of The Columbus Dispatch.
The New York Times – For most of its 137-year history, The Columbus Dispatch has carried articles and images from The Associated Press. Like most big American newspapers, it supplements the work of its own staff with dozens of items daily from The A.P.
That may end soon.
Unhappy with both the A.P. service and its price — more than $800,000 a year at a time when The Dispatch’s finances are severely pinched — the paper on Friday took the once-unthinkable step of saying it would drop the service.
What had been a minor newspaper rebellion against The A.P. suddenly grew much more serious last week, when the Tribune Company, one of the largest newspaper chains, said on Thursday that it would drop out of the association, followed by The Dispatch’s announcement. A handful of papers have made the same move over the last few months, but with the exception of The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, they were relatively small.
Tribune, in disclosing the plan to sever its ties with The A.P., voiced no complaints about the service, saying only that it needed to cut costs. The move raised the prospect of major Tribune papers like The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune publishing without the aid of a wire service that has been an essential part of American journalism since the cooperative was established more than a century and a half ago.
But editors and publishers at some other papers have become vocal critics of the way The A.P. operates, saying that it charges more than they can afford, delivers too little of what they need and — particularly galling to them — is sometimes acting as their competitor on the Internet.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/business/media/20ap.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Categories: AP · Economy · Newspapers
Editor’s Note: So much is built upon trust in relationships – reporter vs. source, editor vs. reporter, boss vs. employee. The same goes in our economy. When people begin to lose trust in the economy and our institutions, watch out. This is an excellent piece that appears in today’s NYT.
The New York Times – In 1929, Meyer Mishkin owned a shop in New York that sold silk shirts to workingmen. When the stock market crashed that October, he turned to his son, then a student at City College, and offered a version of this sentiment: It serves those rich scoundrels right.
A year later, as Wall Street’s problems were starting to spill into the broader economy, Mr. Mishkin’s store went out of business. He no longer had enough customers. His son had to go to work to support the family, and Mr. Mishkin never held a steady job again.
Frederic Mishkin — Meyer’s grandson and, until he stepped down a month ago, an ally of Ben Bernanke’s on the Federal Reserve Board — told me this story the other day, and its moral is obvious enough. Many people in Washington fear that the country is starting to spiral into a terrible downturn. And to their horror, they see the public, and many members of Congress, turning into modern-day Meyer Mishkins, more interested in punishing Wall Street than saving the economy.
All of which may be true. But there is good reason for the public’s skepticism. The experts and policy makers who so desperately want to take action have failed to tell a compelling story about why they’re so afraid.
It’s not enough to say that markets could freeze up, loans could become impossible to get and the economy could slide into its worst downturn since the Great Depression. For now, the crisis has had little effect on most Americans, beyond their 401(k) statements. So to them, the specter of a depression can sound alarmist, and the $700 billion bill that Congress voted down this week can seem like a bailout for rich scoundrels.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/business/economy/01leonhardt.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Categories: Economy · Trust · bailout
The Wall Street Journal – The financial crisis that began 13 months ago has entered a new, far more serious phase.
Lingering hopes that the damage could be contained to a handful of financial institutions that made bad bets on mortgages have evaporated. New fault lines are emerging beyond the original problem — troubled subprime mortgages — in areas like credit-default swaps, the credit insurance contracts sold by American International Group Inc. and others. There’s also a growing sense of wariness about the health of trading partners.
The consequences for companies and chief executives who tarry — hoping for better times in which to raise capital, sell assets or acknowledge losses — are now clear and brutal, as falling share prices and fearful lenders send troubled companies into ever-deeper holes. This weekend, such a realization led John Thain to sell the century-old Merrill Lynch & Co. to Bank of America Corp. Each episode seems to bring government intervention that is more extensive and expensive than the previous one, and carries greater risk of unintended consequences.
Expectations for a quick end to the crisis are fading fast. “I think it’s going to last a lot longer than perhaps we would have anticipated,” Anne Mulcahy, chief executive of Xerox Corp., said Wednesday.
“This has been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. There is no question about it,” said Mark Gertler, a New York University economist who worked with fellow academic Ben Bernanke, now the Federal Reserve chairman, to explain how financial turmoil can infect the overall economy. “But at the same time we have the policy mechanisms in place fighting it, which is something we didn’t have during the Great Depression.”
The U.S. financial system resembles a patient in intensive care. The body is trying to fight off a disease that is spreading, and as it does so, the body convulses, settles for a time and then convulses again. The illness seems to be overwhelming the self-healing tendencies of markets. The doctors in charge are resorting to ever-more invasive treatment, and are now experimenting with remedies that have never before been applied. Fed Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, walking into a hastily arranged meeting with congressional leaders Tuesday night to brief them on the government’s unprecedented rescue of AIG, looked like exhausted surgeons delivering grim news to the family.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169431617549947.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
http://online.wsj.com/video/what-to-expect-as-market-readjusts/D389E9AF-9933-446E-9E15-6426F0D7F46E.html
Categories: Economy · bailout · recession
The New York Times – On Oct. 10, Forbes magazine employees anxiously arrived at work. The previous afternoon, a Thursday, the Dow Jones industrial average had closed below 9,000 points for the first time in five years, a drop of almost 700 points.
